Personally I use it read hundreds of blog posts a day, ET among them. The benefit of using a blog reader is severalfold:

1. it keeps track of what you have read and only displays what is new.
2. you can organize multiple feeds into one location, like a custom newspaper.
3. often times the subject line and short paragraph in the readers are all you need to move on; it saves you time from going through each entry manually and going around ads, etc.